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A person who is actually a climate skeptic (and WUWT regular) applied for and was granted a training slot in Chicago this week. http://climaterealityproject.org/leadership-corps/ and has graduated as one of the 1500 people that attended the event.
For obvious reasons, I can’t reveal the person’s name, but I can reveal the communication I received last night.
The ‘mole’ writes:
I’m now a card-carrying, official Gore-bot.
(I took copious notes)
a) This was a super-liberal “kum-bay-ya” crowd as I predicted. I kept many of my opinions to myself. The event truly did have a “religious cult programming” feel to it, similar to an Amway meeting I attended years ago – carefully timed applause, audience call & response etc. Very bizarre.
b) Al Gore himself went through the entire slide show that we are supposed to use as his “Climate Leaders.” Quite honestly, there is nothing new here, EXCEPT that there is no trace of the “hockey stick” graph that was so central to “An Inconvenient Truth”!! Amazing, considering how central that was to their arguments!
c) Instead, Al lumps data together year-by-year or decade-by-decade to show an ever increasing rise in temps. He poo-pooed measurement inaccuracies, specifically mentioning UHI effects and saying that the scientists determined these were insignificant.
d) A couple graphs stood out – one showed the documented rise in temperature PRECEDES the rise in CO2 which he brushed aside as “typical variation.” The only hockey stick was one that projected atmospheric CO2 over time, jumping up drastically in coming years. I didn’t have time to write units down, but it was a big jump. It could be a realistic rise with China & India bringing new coal plants online, I’d have to check any citations.
e) Al’s presentation was heavy on his new concept of “dirty weather,” see: http://www.huffingtonpost.com/2012/11/14/24-hours-of-reality-dirty-weather_n_2130344.html
To summarize, I didn’t see anything new or ground-breaking in this mess. Most slides were BS, typical “this is due to climate, not weather” type stuff we kick around on WUWT all the time. Hurricane Sandy, torrential rains in Pakistan etc.
Personal observations:
a) We skeptics ain’t liked much with them folks. The “d” word (denier) was used liberally, and I queried several participants, some of who were very cool folks, about it. Al Gore and his speakers used “Denier,” “Denial Industry” and other terms I found objectionable. Lousy salesmen, you catch more flies with honey than vinegar.
b) Nothing new was presented, technically speaking. This thing was “An Inconvenient Truth” redux, with much of the controversial stuff (hockey stick & drowning polar bears) deleted. Al got our message, he doesn’t seem to want to engage folks like us.
c) Al gave some insights into his own choices for low-carbon technologies, with a focus upon photovoltaics & wind power. He doesn’t like BWR nukes and objects because of financial reasons, which I agree with (particularly post-Fukishima). He mentioned that Oak Ridge National Labs in TN is testing a variety of nuclear reactor designs which sound promising (thorium maybe?) but didn’t elaborate.
d) Stuff I’m interested in, like ocean acidification, were only briefly touched upon. Al didn’t discuss the diplomacy challenges of engaging China and India, although he did mention their growing carbon output.
Quick summary:
Al is a polished speaker, and looked trim & in shape. Very impressive command of his speaking material. Decent speakers lined up, including some sustainability folks from private industry. I’m told the health/climate breakout session was terrible & am glad I took a pass on it.
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UPDATE: Since many of the Gore followers are arriving here, I welcome you to answer this question that nobody would ask Mr. Gore this week:
If the position and science is so strong, why did Mr. Gore have to fake the results of his experiment in the Climate 101 video (which you may have seen and is still on the climate reality web page).
You can see the experiment recreated here: http://wattsupwiththat.com/climate-fail-files/gore-and-bill-nye-fail-at-doing-a-simple-co2-experiment/
For the few of you brave enough, thanks for taking the time to answer that question – Anthony
Actually, I myself am not paid by the fossil fuel industry. The poster above has got that in reverse. I pay the fossil fuel industry for affordable gas and reasonable electricity to my home on demand and use it as I see fit. This gives me economic and physical mobility not enjoyed by many people in the world.
Now consider whether these necessities, pleasures, and conveniences of everyday life in America should be restricted only to certain classes. Because that is what these heartless environmental activists are offering you: class restrictions on chariots, weapons, art, and innovative technologies, just like Plato’s Republic. There’s absolutely nothing noble in creating a ruthless, privileged aristocracy with the ability to pass laws that are separate for separate classes.
Mr. Lynn….you try so hard to sound informed but your understanding of atmospheric science is about Jr High level…”You Keep Using That Word, I Do Not Think It Means What You Think It Means”
for the rest of you…this article is silly at best. This “mole” is voicing an opinion…the fact that you all came to suckle on it and treat it like some sort of gotcha grail is demonstrates a complete and utter lack of critical thinking.
REPLY: for an exercise in critical thinking why not answer why Mr. Gore had to fake the results of his climate 101 video in post production? See: http://wattsupwiththat.com/climate-fail-files/gore-and-bill-nye-fail-at-doing-a-simple-co2-experiment/
I’d say that is rather “hard to deny”.
– Anthony
@ur momisugly Science is hard to deny says: August 2, 2013 at 9:53 am
Gee Mr.(non)Science, that is all you have been spouting – your opinion. But at least we recognize the difference.
I attended the Chicago Climate Reality Leadership conference. It was by no means free however, there was no charge incurred resulting from agreement to participate. There were personal sacrifices made by the self-funding participants – 1500 from over 50 countries and every state of the United States also represented. There ages, occupations, and educational backgrounds were as diversified as they come. There were mothers, fathers, children, students, soldiers, scientists, biologists, professors, teachers, lawyers, ministers, government, and corporate representatives and many other walks, both conservatives and liberals, coming together with one shared interest – the well-being of our natural world and a strong desire to induce positive changes in the ways and means that we live, consume, and operate at personal, commercial, and industrial levels. It was a message of hope and solutions. There was no “timed-applause” but rather response to a very passionate message that any caring human being can relate to – which is the legacy of the planet that we will leave behind for our children. Any individual with reasonable intelligence, logic and reason would be hard pressed to hold a convincing argument that the exponentially growing population and industrial developments in emerging countries are not placing extreme demands on our precious natural resources. I have never been a follower. I am of strong mind, independence, and conviction that is it critical for today’s leaders to implement sustainable practices which generate positive impacts towards healthier people and a healthier planet. I choose a path of teaching my children these lessons and am inspired by the number of humanitarians and environmentalists that share Al Gore’s passion, mine, and the 1498 other compassionate human beings that heard the same message as I over the past three days. Time well spent in pursuit of personal growth towards my two greatest passions – our children’s future (your future too) and our natural world.
Oh but then again, simple peasants have always needed religion to cling to, so that will be provided later. But right now, the environmental/globalist activists are not officially cultists.
Ox AO @ur momisugly7:49 am wrote:
>>OH my gosh, I have to read up on Karl Popper now after you pointed out he was the start of empirical falsification over deductive logic. He was also the start of the Open Society and “intolerance should not be tolerated” and other Looney Toon ideas we have today.
Not quite. Popper like Bacon 300 years earlier rejected induction as empirically impossible, representing as it does infinite regression. Bacon replaced that philosophical/mathematical precept with Cause & Effect, which I call scientific deduction when used to predict. (Note, esp. milodonharlani @ur momisugly 9:11 am: switching from induction to deduction because infinite regression is gone.) Popper seems to have been unable or unwilling to grasp Bacon. Popper needed infinite regression because he thought science consisted of propositions like All Crows Are Black, and because Popper held, “Definitions do not matter.” He must have thought all scientists fools.
Falsification was the capstone of Popper’s PMS, added last to satisfy the need for some way to test his models. He saw it as a separate clause, which seems never to been realized in any scientific model. A Modern Scientist can rationalize an existence for falsification as the validation of predictions. A Post Modern Scientist is lost because his model of science has no C&E by which to make a prediction.
Maybe I help you decode Popper because only a masochist would want to search everything he wrote.
PMS has five tenets, documented by the US Supreme Court in Daubert v. Merrell Dow, affirming (1) – (4) and denying (5). They are found in Popper as follows:
(1) Falsifiability. Popper, K. R., Science: Conjectures and Refutations, 1953 (Ge)/1963 (Eng), p. 7.
(2) Peer-review/Publication. Popper, K. R., The Open Society and Its Enemies [OSE], 1945, pp. II-213, II-225-6.
(3) Single error rate decision making. Popper, K.R., The Logic of Scientific Discovery, 1934 (Ge)/1959 (Eng), p. 256.
(4) Consensus.Popper (1945), p. II-205.
(5) Political Correctness. Popper (1945), p. II-220.
Observe the absence of C&E in PMS. None of these five tenets of PMS, including in particular AGW, is valid in MS. The two models of science are mutually exclusive.
Val says: ” Time well spent in pursuit of personal growth towards my two greatest passions – our children’s future (your future too) and our natural world.”
Your time would be better spent in engineering and science books, doing hard work and coming up with viable solutions to make current energy sources obsolete. I can tell you now handing out billions in tax payers money to private corporations for weak solar panels and wind farms does nothing toward positive change to future generations. What you think should happen isn’t real, what happens is real.
To Science is hard to deny:
What Science??? Models? that’s not science, it’s psuedo-science at best
JY – I’m not a scientist but I raised one! Big smile. I diligently feed my intellectual growth as well…should you have wrongly assumed otherwise.
How quaint, a bunch of clueless Gore-bots have shown up, all spouting the same mindless drivel. If only they’d bother to stick around, they might actually learn something. True to form though, they won’t.
A pity.
We are now informed in Val’s post that the activists participated at personal expense “to induce positive changes in the ways and means that we live, consume, and operate at personal, commercial, and industrial levels,” but that also coincides perfectly with the stated purpose of…NGOs.
Not only that, “cultists” may indeed be an appropriate, precise, and accurate term for Al Gore and his training of “Climate Leadership Corps.”
Gaia paganism/environmentalism as religion:
“Al Gore, in his book Earth in the Balance, echoes this view “Prehistoric Europe and much of the world was based on the worship of a single earth goddess, who was assumed to be the fount of all life and who radiated harmony among all living things. Much of the evidence for the existence of this primitive religion comes from the many thousands of artifacts uncovered in ceremonial sites. These sites are so widespread that they seem to confirm the notion that a goddess religion was ubiquitous through much of the world until the antecedents of today’s religions, most of which still have a distinctly masculine orientation…swept out of India and the Near East, almost obliterating belief in the goddess. The last vestige of organized goddess worship was eliminated by Christianity as late as the fifteenth century in Lithuania.”
Gore then quotes deChardin, “‘The fate of mankind, as well as of religion, depends upon the emergence of a new faith in the future.’ Armed with such a faith, we might find it possible to resanctify the earth…” ” http://www.green-agenda.com/gaia.html
Mary A. Colborn says:
August 2, 2013 at 9:16 am
“Extreme” weather, however defined is not happening around the world. If anything, weather has been less extreme recently. Please show the data upon which you rely to come to this conclusion so at odds with observed reality.
In a warming, more equable world, weather ought to become less “extreme”, since the engine of so many atmospheric phenomena is energy or temperature differentials. The colder the world, the more violent its storms, as a general rule.
Besides which, earth has not warmed statistically significantly for up to 23 years, depending upon data set (& of course the surface sets have been “adjusted” to make recent years warmer & older decades cooler). So what human activity do you imagine is causing this supposedly “extreme” weather?
In any case, is weather now climate?
@David L –
Fascism is actually Marxist as well, from two perspectives: Mussolini was an ardent Marxist before he founded the Italian Fascisti, while the Nazi Party in Germany was founded by one Anton Drexler, another doctrinaire Marxist, six months before Hitler joined it, and Drexler equated the Marxist bourgeois class enemy with the Jews – hence, Nazi anti-Semitism.
@morgo –
The Hitler Youth analogy would also seem to apply to the IRS’s line dancing videos . . .
@JY –
Wind and solar are more than weak – they destroy habitats, despoil landscapes, emit a who new generation of pollutants – and most ironically of all, they force more fossil fuels to be burned in order to accommodate them, than if there were no wind or solar.
The thing all of these have in common, and in common with AGW, is the impulse to tyranny and regimentation.
And today’s green is different from the hippie era, as regrettable as that was in so many ways – it is intentionally, wantonly destructive of civilization and of all the advances made over the last millennium. Honest science is always the first casualty of tyranny.
Jeff Glassman says:
August 2, 2013 at 10:16 am
(Note, esp. milodonharlani @ur momisugly 9:11 am: switching from induction to deduction because infinite regression is gone.)
Please explain how Bacon, the advocate of induction, is in your mind now an adherent of deduction because infinite regression is gone. I think I understand what you’re trying to say, but such a 180 degree shift in Bacon’s thought IMO requires explication in more detail than this offhand comment. Taking Bacon’s name in vain in this way isn’t to me intuitively obvious.
The philosophical distinction is important. Darwin’s geology mentor Sedgwick attacked “development” or “transmutation of species” for not being, in his mind, inductive, hence, not scientific. Interestingly, Popper also initially regarded natural selection as unscientific, since not falsifiable, although eventually changed his mind when biologists educated him on the fact & theory of evolution (“rabbits in the Cambrian” would falsify the fact of evolution, in which case the theory wouldn’t matter).
It would be nice to have an ACORN-style recording next time.
Legatus, update your search. One dead, an old plant manager. Media ran with it for a few days then stopped. Sounded to me like he’d been “on the way out” beforehand, but lets not split hairs. One is the same as zero from a narrative perspectrive. “Less dangerous to humans than Mexican tomato imports”.
Chernobyl stands as the worst human nuclear tragedy, with a few dozen short term dead, a few thousand sick liquidators dying early, a generation of Belyorussians born within a year or two of the incident with higher than average lymphatic cancer rates, and an extrordinary proportion of the country claiming some form of ill effect for financial benefit.
You can blame human stupid for it, but you also have to admit that human stupid persists. “Never again” is delusional.
philjourdan says:
August 2, 2013 at 10:45 am
@ur momisugly Sandra – how much did you get paid to post that?
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Clearly, Rev. Al was preaching to the choir, so no evidence was wanted or needed, just congregational clapping & swaying along to the hymns, with metaphorical snake handling to go with the snake oil peddling.
Perhaps you should direct your “strong mind” to looking more closely at the question of resources, population, and development. Here’s a good place to start:
http://chiefio.wordpress.com/2009/05/08/there-is-no-shortage-of-stuff/
http://chiefio.wordpress.com/2009/03/20/there-is-no-energy-shortage/
I sometimes think ‘sustainability’ may be the dirtiest word in the English language. The proponents of ‘sustainability’ would drive us back to dung fires, dibble sticks, and squatting in the bush. That’s still how a lot of humanity lives. The key to their emergence into 21st-century civilization is energy: vast amounts of cheap, plentiful energy; and the key to that is ‘fossil’ fuel: coal, oil, natural gas (with nuclear as a plus). Raise the cost of energy and you condemn most of mankind to abject poverty. As far as I can see, that’s the aim of those who constantly spout the ‘sustainability’ mantra.
They’re militant, and threatening about it, too:
Sorry, where you’re heading is the opposite of progress, the opposite of compassion, and will lead to nothing but poverty, misery, and despair for all of humanity. I’ll have none of it.
/Mr Lynn
I’d be interested in what non-climate issues came up. Any anti-GMO talk? Vaxxers? Anti-fluoridation? I noticed those things tend to come up in the same circles. Raw veganism*?
*For those of you who’ve never heard of it, raw vegans believe that cooking food causes ‘toxins’. Nothing above 118 degrees F. Why 118? Elifino.
[As you can see, repeatedly labeling people you disagree with as “deniers” gets your comment snipped. — mod.]
And if millions around the world simply committed to live and act daily with sustainable practices thereby resulting in declining CO2 levels, I feel pretty confident based on the majority mindset here that your consensus and agenda would be persuading that human beings also could not impact the positive changes. Fine with me. Achieving the desired result would be satisfying and rewarding result in itself. Optimistic. At least consider the possibility that our human demands and developments do have an impact and our actions and simply changing a few of our habits can be positive….unless the mind is closed to just agree that we are all human beings on one world. What harm could possibly come from being more friendly to the earth?
What harm could possibly result from transforming the economy? It has been done before, during China’s Great Leap. Lysenkoism also destroyed crops and this resulted in starvation for millions of people. Scientists in league with governments have historically been quite lethal to the people in many countries in the last century. Now you know what harm could possibly result.
Is it possible to put the argument aside? We’ve stated our positions. We have our convictions. I urge you to visit a nature sanctuary, national park, or other escape to our natural world and find a way to be appreciate the beauty and along with that perhaps an idea of how to be more earth-friendly. If you struggle for ideas, I can give you a few personal sustainability ideas that we as individuals can practice. Again, what harm could come from that?
What is most amusing is that all the Gorebots are basically saying the same thing! As if they were given talking points with worthless statements to make (e.g. men, women and children, the hardships of attending, the cost, etc.).
If the cost was so high (in time and travel), why did you waste your time? Only a true devout Gorebot would do so.
How many Hindus make the pilgrimage to Mecca?
What harm could come from destroying the energy and agricultural sectors of our economy? This is precisely the problem with progressives who decide to use science for the public good. They do not make observations of the destructive results of their own policies, and they do not acknowledge the role of scientists in the worst episodes of human history, which I sited above. Now Karl Popper, if he were here, would insist that the ghastly results of these social and economic experiments carried out in the UK and Spain at least be acknowledged. You will not get that from the “Climate Leadership Corps.”
Zeke. Since you rephrase the “what harm can come,” I just want to clarify. Is it your intent to imply that personal sustainability choices and living more environmentally friendly will lead to the destruction of an economy? If not, might you have anything positive to contribute or must you always be on the defensive? What’s your story? What does the future look like for you? Do you have any children?